Hull House allows Denison students to help with poverty in Newark

Taylor Shook pushes her phone to the center of the table. She pushes a button to loudly play a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up on marriage for the table of roommates.

Her audience is shocked.

“It perfectly summarizes what it’s like living in the Hull House," says the Denison University junior from Columbus.

“You hear the violent metal chunka chunka chunka,” Jerry Seinfeld says from the tinny recording from her phone. “What’s going on here? Man this thing goes high and then this thing gets to the top. The wedding is at the top.” A loud train horn blares in the background. 

Shook interjects, “Moving to the Hull House!”

“And then you just scream on the way down,” Seinfeld says. “Despite your greatest plans, you’re never really ready for marriage. Any growth, you can’t be ready for because it’s growth it’s going to new. You’re going to be a new person.”

“Boom,” Shook says as she pauses the recording and looks to her roommates with excitement.

Four Denison students, Summer Aldred ‘20 from Detroit,  Andrew Boyle ‘19 from Cleveland, Kellon Patey '19 from Tennessee and Shook live about fifteen minutes off Denison's campus in Newark. They live in the Hull House, part of an effort to help the local community through volunteering that goes beyond service learning by creating a meeting place that could be consistent.

The idea was sparked in 2014  when a Denison economics class worked with the Newark Think Tank on Poverty, a nonprofit that works towards educating and planning actions that challenge barriers preventing people from living healthy and productive lives, and learned that a community need was consistency. A place where the community could gather consistently that was not affiliated.

“When you’re trying to organize working people with really busy schedules and single parent households, you need to be at the same place at the same time so that you can be dependable and build a consistent membership,” Patey said. “But these are not organizations that have budgets to afford this, so you’re at the whim of the library schedule or a church.”

Patey conferred with community leaders and Denison professors and was inspired with the idea of calling it Hull House -- a Chicago social idea that was a model for social assistance.   .

This past few months the four have been living in their new house and have attended 35 community meetings in 13 weeks, and contributed over 450 hours to organizing and service on and off campus.

“It’s not that we know something that the residents of Newark don’t,” Shook said. “If anything, they know things that we don’t. The way that we know the things that we know is from reading and listening to profs, watching docs, reading news articles. The way working class people know these things are through living it, experiencing it.”

The Hull House is modeled after its predecessors in Chicago and other cities across the country. The local adaptation of this tradition is to be a stronghold of aid, co-creation, critical thought,and collaborative action.

“I didn’t want to be on campus anymore,” Ambar Deleon, a junior former resident now studying abroad, said. “I wasn’t learning enough. I wasn’t doing enough to affect any change on campus. The Hull House provided that medium.”

The residents hope that the Hull House will serve as a meeting space, a hub for service, an office for organizing, and a place of learning for those who strive to leave Licking County more informed, equitable, and prosperous than they found it.

“When I stepped into the house, I enjoyed the dislocation,” Boyle said. “We created our own experience that it is well-intentioned.”

On Saturday, Dec. 2, the Hull House was open to the community. Their community partners were present and prospective students alike were enjoying the hors d'oeuvres displayed in dining room.

During the open house, it was evident that the Hull House had succeeded in connecting with the Newark community. Patey dubbed it an unofficial “Newark Pride Event.” The living room was crowded with supportive Newark residents -- some of whom had been working with the Hull house, the Denison faculty and administration like Vice President Laurel Kennedy, and fellow students.

“I hope the institution understands that this can be a benefit for the students and the community,” Lesha Farias, founding member of the Newark Think Tank on Poverty said. “The residents are now familiar with Newark and they [Hull House] has had so much progress.I’m really proud of them becoming neighbors and doing what they do.”

The Hull House has donated their garage space for the Newark Homeless Outreach, recently building shelves to contain the overflowing donations from the community for their donation station every Saturday on East Main and Buena Vista streets

“Awesome to see young people addressing today’s problems,” Trish Perry, co-founder of the Newark Homeless Outreach with Jen Kanagy and County Coordinator for Ohio CAN said. “They have goals to better the community and they look to help others. We’re so blessed to have them and to have their support.”